As it skimmed over the cloud tops of Titan, the moon’s gravity field slingshot
And
It detected cascades of exotic high-energy particles. And it was brushed by a powerful magnetic field, a ferocious electromagnetic knot in space. It reported to Earth, sending a stream of highly compressed data using sporadic laser bursts.
The
Its last observation, in a sense its last conscious thought, was of a sudden twisting of the anomaly’s strong magnetic field.
Like any sufficiently advanced machine the anomaly was sentient to some degree. The destruction it had been designed to inflict was for the future, and did not yet trouble it. But it was touched by a hint of regret at the smashing of the puppyish machine that had followed it so far, with its laughable attempt at concealment.
Alone, the anomaly sailed through Saturn’s system, harvested momentum and kinetic energy from the giant planet, and flung itself toward the distant sun, and the warm worlds that huddled around it.
3: Abdikadir
On Mir the first hint of the coming strangeness would have been mundane, if not for its utter incongruity.
Abdikadir was irritated when the clerk called him away from the telescope. It was a clear night, for once. The first-generation refugees from Earth always complained about the cloudiness of Mir, this stitched-together world in its own stitched-together cosmos. But tonight the seeing was fine, and Mars swam high in the cloudless sky, a brilliant blue.
Before the clerk’s interruption the observatory on the roof of the Temple of Marduk was a scene of silent industry. The main instrument was a reflector, its great mirror ground by Mongol slaves under the command of a Greek scholar of the School of Othic. It returned a fine if wavering image of the face of Mars. As Abdi observed, his clerks turned the levers that swung the telescope mount around to counterbalance the rotation of the world, thus keeping Mars steadily in the center of Abdi’s field of view. He sketched hastily at the pad strapped to his knee; industry in Alexander’s world-empire had not yet advanced to the point where photogra-phy was possible.
Of Mars, he could clearly see the polar caps, the blue seas, the ocher deserts crisscrossed by bands of green-brown and blue, and even a glimmer of light from the alien cities that were believed to nestle in the dead caldera of Mons Olympus.
It was while he was engaged on his labor, intent on exploiting every second of the seeing, that the clerk came to Abdi. Spiros was fourteen, an Othic student, third-generation Mir-born. He was a bright, imaginative boy but prone to nervousness, and now he could barely stammer out his news to an astronomer not a decade older than he was.
“Calm down, boy. Take a breath. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“The chamber of Marduk—” The very heart of the temple on whose roof they both stood. “You must come, Master!”
“Why? What will I see?”
“Not see, Master Abdi
Abdi glanced once more at his eyepiece, where even now Mars’s blue light glimmered. But the boy’s agitation was convincing.
With ill grace he clambered down from his seat at the eyepiece, and snapped at one of his students. “You, Xenia! Take over. I don’t want to waste a second of this seeing.” The girl hurried to comply.
Spiros ran for the ladder.
“This had better be worth it,” Abdi said, hurrying after the boy.
They had to descend, and then climb back up inside the temple’s carcass, for the chamber of the great god Marduk was near the very apex of the complex. They passed through a bewildering variety of rooms lit by oil lamps burning smokily in alcoves. Long after the temple’s abandonment by its priests there was still a powerful smell of incense.
Abdi walked into Marduk’s chamber, peering around.
Once this room had contained a great golden statue of the god.
During the Discontinuity, the event that created the world, the statue had been destroyed, and the walls had been reduced to bare brick, scorched by some intense heat. Only the statue’s base remained, softened and rounded, with perhaps the faintest trace of two mighty feet. The chamber was a ruin, as if wrecked by an explosion. But it had been this way all Abdi’s life.
Abdi turned on Spiros. “Well? Where’s the crisis?”
“Can’t you hear?” the boy asked, breathless. And he stood still, his finger on his lips.
And then Abdi heard it, a soft chirruping almost like a cricket — but too regular, too even. He glanced at the wide-eyed boy, who was frozen with fear.
Abdi stepped into the center of the room. From here he could tell the chirruping was coming from an ornately carved shrine, fixed to one wall. He approached this now, and the sound grew louder.
For the sake of face before the boy, Abdi tried to keep his hand from trembling as he reached out to the small cupboard at the very center of the shrine, and pulled open its door.
He knew what the shrine contained. This pebble-like artifact had come from the Earth to Mir. Belonging to a companion of Abdi’s father’s called Bisesa Dutt, it had been cherished for years, and then lodged here when its power finally failed.
It was a phone.
And it was ringing.
Part 2 JOURNEYS
4: When the Sleeper Wakes
Bisesa was glad to get out of the sleep facility itself. It stank of the bad-egg hydrogen sulphide they used to stop your organs taking up oxygen.
In the hospital, it took the doctors three days to put her blood back into her veins, to persuade her organs to take up oxygen, and to get her through enough basic physiotherapy that she could walk with a Zimmer frame. She felt unutterably old, older than her forty-nine biological years, and she was wasted too, a famine victim. Her eyes were particularly prickly and sore. She suffered odd vision defects, even mild hallucinations at first. Also she had the unpleasant sense that she smelled of her own urine.
